Want to Feel Young? Visit Matera.
Forget all the anti-aging creams. Forget the beauty hacks. If you really want to feel young and make your daily struggles seem insignificant, visit the oldest city in the world.
Matera, located in Basilicata in the South of Italy, has been inhabited since the Old Stone Age, for around 10,000 years. The city with the complex of homes carved into stones, the “Sassi di Matera” (ital. for stones of Matera), was announced European capital of culture for 2019, and in the same year, even a James Bond movie was shot there.
However, this gorgeous city hasn’t always enjoyed this much prestige. In the mid 20th century, Matera was known as the ‘Shame of Italy’. 16,000 people were living in cave dwellings with no electricity or running water, barely any sunlight, together with their livestock, when the city was riddled with Malaria. The government decided to rehome the inhabitants to the outskirts of the city, and the slum became a ghost town. Matera started to be used for drug dealing and prostitution until the government took action again in the 1980s and offered incentives for people to revamp the abandoned caves. Hotels, restaurants, and art galleries started to spring up, and just a couple of years later, in 1993, Matera was awarded UNESCO World Heritage Site and used as a location in various films, such as The Passion Of The Christ in 2004, resurrecting the long ill repute of the Tuscany-reminding city.
Today, Matera is an amazing destination to travel to if you feel like rewinding the clock and visiting a distant past. Walking through the limestone streets, up and down the stairs all over the city, I couldn’t help but imagine all the people who had been here before.
You can get a great feel for the city by just wandering around with no destination and discover the gems at your own pace, but if you’re on a schedule, these are the must-see sights:
Palombaro Lungo: a giant manmade water cistern that was carved into a rock just below the big market square Piazza Vittorio Veneto. It is part of the huge complex water system with numerous cisterns of different sizes that extend under the old town. The inhabitants used it to collect rainwater, serving as the city’s main water supply. You can explore the complex on an iron grate. To say that its size is impressive is an understatement — you constantly need to remind yourself that you are underground, as it is easy to forget with its size being as big as (and formed like) a cathedral — hence the name “Water Cathedral”. It used to hold up to 5 million litres or 1.1 million gallons of water!
Casa Grottas: if you want to know what a typical cave house used to look like from the inside, visit one (or all!) of the casa grottas, complete with furniture, fittings, model livestock and residents, and fully equipped as if time had stopped:
- C’era una Volta
- Casa Grotta del Vicinato
- Casa Grotta nei Sassi di Matera
- Casa Grotta del Casalnuovo
- Casa Grotta Narrante
If you are a museum enthusiast and enjoy looking at artwork and archaeological finds, check out the following museums:
- Museo Nazionale d’Arte Medievale e Moderna della Basilicata: situated in the Lanfranchi Palace built in the 17th century, the National Modern and Medieval Arts Museum of Basilicata carries several art paintings and ancient mosaics, including some of the artworks collected by Camillo D’Errico, a private Italian art collector in the nineteenth century, and paintings by Carlo Levi, a famous Italian writer and painter from the 20th century. (Piazzetta Pascoli, 1, 75100 Matera)
- Museo Nazionale Domenico Ridola: the National Archaeological Museum of Basilicata presents different artefacts from the Neolithic era to the Middle Ages, including a Greek vase collection dating back to the 6th and 5th cent. BC, when Matera was an Ancient Greek colony. Visit this museum to learn more about this era! (Via Domenico Ridola, 24, 75100 Matera)
- Museo della Scultura Contemporanea: this contemporary art museum is the only cave museum in the world and probably the most important museum dedicated to sculptures in Italy. However, the museum also carries graphic art, ceramics, and jewellery. It is situated inside the 17th-century Palace Pomarici which is known for its impressive size and thus also called “The Hundred Rooms Palace”. If you want to see a real Pablo Picasso piece, visit the MUSMA! (Via S. Giacomo, 75100 Matera)
If you haven’t already, you need to book a flight to Bari (1.5 hour train ride from Matera) ASAP. While the city is a popular tourist destination for Italians, it’s not yet as flooded with tourists as other Italian cities, but it’s not guaranteed that it’s going to be a hidden gem for much longer. If you want to make all your troubles go away, explore this gorgeous city, get a caffè or a gelato at Piazza Vittorio Veneto, and delve into the ancient stories this city has to tell.
